jeudi 12 juillet 2012

It is 2025. Your mobile is now much more than just a communication
device - more like a remote control for your life. You still call it a
"mobile" from habit, but it is an organiser, entertainment device,
payment device and security centre, all developed and manufactured by
engineers.

On a typical day it will start work even before you wake. Because it
knows your travel schedule it can check for problems on the roads or
with the trains and adjust the time it wakes you up accordingly, giving
you the best route into work. It can control your home, re-programming
the central heating if you need to get up earlier and providing remote
alerts if the home security system is triggered. It is your payment
system - just by placing the phone near a sensor on a barrier, like the
Oyster card readers in use on London transport, you can pay for tickets
for journeys or buy items in shops. With an understanding of location,
the mobile can also provide directions, or even alert the user to
friends or family in the vicinity.
It is your entertainment centre when away from home. As well as
holding all your music files, as some phones today are able to do, it
will work with your home entertainment system while you sleep to find
programmes that will interest you and download them as a podcast to
watch on the train or in other spare moments. It will intelligently work
out what to do with incoming phone calls and messages. Because it knows
your diary it will also know, for example, to direct voice calls to
voicemail when you are in a meeting, perhaps providing a discrete text
summary of the caller and the nature of their call.
With its understanding of almost all aspects of your life, many new
services become possible. For example, a "Good Food" meal planning
service could send daily suggestions for your evening meal based on
learned preferences, previous selections made and the likely contents of
your refrigerator. The latter might work by uploading the bill from the
weekly grocery shop and then removing those items it deduces have been
used for meals earlier in the week.
Leaving home without your mobile, bad enough already, will become
rather like leaving home without your wallet, keys, music player and
mobile all at once - quite unthinkable. And in the nicest, most helpful
ways, your mobile will guide you through life.
So what will this apparently massive change in our relationships with
our mobiles require in the way of new technology or extra expenditure?
Actually, surprisingly little. Now that we have widespread cellular
coverage, with high-speed data networks in many homes, offices and
points of congregation such as coffee shops, we have all we need to get
signal to the mobile.
What we do need is better mobiles and more intelligence. Mobiles will
continue to get steadily better, with higher resolution touch-screens,
speech recognition that really works and much greater memory and storage
capabilities. Increasingly intelligent software will be running on
these mobiles, and also on home and wide-area networks, able to learn
behaviour, predict needs and integrate with a growing number of
databases, such as transport updates from major providers. So, instead
of the train company just sending you a text to tell you of delays, your
mobile will analyse it in conjunction with your travel plans and modify
those plans if needs be.
This evolution will be a slow but steady one as every few years
mobiles get slightly better, intelligent software evolves and the
various providers of all the necessary input data - such as transport
organisations and shops - gradually make the data available in formats
that become increasingly useful.
Ten years ago the mobile was purely a device for making voice calls.
Now it is a camera, MP3 player, organiser and texting device. This is
only the start of an evolution that will turn it into our trusted and
indispensable companion in life.